Thursday, November 24, 2011

Last week at Devoxx 2011 I attended a number of sessions covering new JVM based programming languages such as Kotlin and Ceylon. Of course there were also a number of sessions talking about the usual suspects: Groovy, Scala and JRuby.

There were also a considerable amount of talks covering JDK8 and how that's shaping up. I got the strong impression that Oracle certainly doesn't want to see JDK8 turn into another multi-year debacle. Progress on JDK8 (vitual extension functions, closures, ...) seems impressive and I got a real sense of direction and focus from those involved.

I've been following the whole other languages on the JVM movement that has been going on the last couple of years with interest, but mostly as a by-stander: I'm not a hard-core, opinionated programming language expert like some. However, if I look at the input I gathered at Devoxx I can't help but make a few observations:

Although some of the new JVM languages have interesting ideas and are definately a step up from Java, they didn't trigger that aha-erlebnis I had when I first started using Java 1.02 after having used C.

The infectuation with dynamic typing seems to be largely over: everybody is back in agreement that strong static typing is the way to go.

Oracle is on somewhat of a mission to deliver JDK8 sooner rather than later.

All of this makes me wonder if Java's successor will actually be Java itself, but in it's 8th incarnation, and whether or not Java 8 will effectively blow all new contenders out of the water? I'm looking forward to seeing how this unfolds!

About Me

My name is Erwin Vervaet and I keep myself busy being a software engineer. I'm the creator of the Spring Web Flow framework and also wrote a book detailing its usage. My current interests include Software Craftsmanship, Event Driven Architecture, and data temporality.